Site ReDesign:
This becomes inevitable for any E-commerce organization or any organization which has a web presence to keep their site updated with the latest features, technology and make it visible on all the major Search Engines.
The usability adherence also becomes a big factor when the trend and tide keep changing almost at lightning speed.
The user community is vast and diversified and we should never attempt to build a site which satisfies all users. It all begins with the ‘RESEARCH’ about the user behavior, our target customers, the market we want to capture, our offerings, shortest path to close a sale, information required to be displayed to close a sale and list continues….
When we talk about a Site ReDesign the key things to keep in mind are below:
Motivation behind taking this step: Facelift, Branding, SEO/SEM, Architectural change of the site functioning, Usability etc….
Things to consider before a Site Redesign in short Why or Why not Site ReDesign?
Since ages, usability experts and site visitors have been chanting the same web design mantra: Make your site easy-to-use, professional…
Research on how customers interact with the site shows that visitors make snap judgments—often within seven seconds of landing on the website. In fact, the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility Study found (not startlingly) people evaluate a site largely on its visual design. If the site looks professional, that look enhances the company’s credibility.
An outdated, non-intuitive, unprofessional site can hurt your online image—and excellent reason to undertake a redesign. Similarly, you may have had a shift in business goals that open the door to change. Some companies, however, blindly revamp their sites for no apparent reason other than they are tired of the existing color scheme. For most companies, and especially for small companies on limited budgets, undertaking a redesign is a non-trivial expense. Still, how can you tell if an existing site is on the verge of needing a redesign or has even far exceeded its usefulness? Here are nine questions to guide your decision.
1. Do your analytics show your site is performing? How well does the existing site convert? Are visitors coming to your site only to immediately leave? Identify important metrics that give feedback on your site’s performance and then let real numbers determine your site’s effectiveness. If you have been tracking site metrics over several years and see a general trend in the wrong direction, you may want to look hard at your site and try to identify the problem. On the other hand, if most of the site is performing well, you may want to re-think sinking large sums of money into a new design.
Metrics to look at: # visitors, Entry pages of the site, Conversion Funnels, Search capabilities, Steps till checkout, Information to complete a purchase, Avg. time spent on every page, Time to finish a transaction
2. What specific elements of your site are good (and bad)? Arbitrarily changing your site just for the sake of change is wasteful. Without direction, you may inadvertently remove some of the most important elements that users find helpful. Many companies churn randomly through design after design, never paying attention, tracking or learning from previous revisions. For all their effort and expense, their sites aren’t better—they are just different.
Building a new web site is a costly endeavor. Conduct a usability test on your existing site to identify specifically what’s working and what isn’t. Retain the positive features in the new design while eliminating the negative. The study may even show that minor modifications are all you need as opposed to an entire redesign.
Analytics: Use Heatmaps to see which sections of the pages get the maximum amount of hits.
3. Are you willing to upset your visitors by introducing change? There is an element of risk involved with redesigning your site. Users may react negatively as most humans are naturally opposed to change. In fact, there is an entire discipline devoted to the topic of change management. This discipline is designed to assist individuals with overcoming change resistance in businesses. The new design has to merit the inherent risk in changing what is familiar, especially if you have a large number of customers who regularly return to your site.
Think about it from your visitors’ perspective. It’s as if they came home one day and all their living room furniture had been rearranged. Their favorite chair has been moved over next to the window. The television is on the opposite side of the room. They may not recognize that this is a better design initially… they only see that what was familiar is now chaotic. This reaction explains why it’s not unusual to have a temporary drop in site performance numbers immediately following a new design launch. Regular visitors may be reacting negatively to the change simply because it is new (despite the fact that the redesign may be a dramatic improvement over the old).
Ideal Way to look at a change: Build A/B testing capabilities where the user base can be segmented and the new design can be opened out to a limited number of users before the full fledged big bang launch.
Have feedback mechanism built into the site to get user responses on the new Design. Evaluate the responses to see if this has brought about a change in the way users react to the design. Also the feedback(Questionnaire, Form….) should be designed specifically to address the positives and negatives of the new design.
The new elements introduced, existing elements Redesigned should have specific metrics assigned against them to track the usage.
4. Does your current site design comply with Internet standards and accepted practices?In the book Homepage Usability, Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir deconstruct home pages from 50 companies. One of their interesting findings was that there were certain expectations about where common page elements were expected to be. Through simple repetition throughout cyberspace, these locations became the places users looked for certain elements. If the element was located in the tried and true location, users found the site easier to use. In addition, their overall impressions of the sites were more favorable. Sites deviating from these unwritten guidelines, however, were considered less user-friendly by visitors. Familiarity was key.
Abiding by common site conventions makes perfect sense if you think about it. Users don’t want to have to learn your site. They have busy lives. If the site isn’t intuitive and easy to use, they will leave and find another site that is. Here’s a case in point.
One of the sites redesigned recently had a horrendous design where to look at the major chunk of the data the users had to scroll. The search box was not visible enough for users to see. The site had a huge graphic in the middle of the page which almost had to be maintained manually to keep it in sync with latest developments. The top navigation had colors which almost blended with the rest of the site which made it difficult to locate. The call to action were really weak.
Post release a bunch the increase in bounce rate convinced the company the earlier design performed better.
5. Have company changes dictated a new design? If your company has been acquired or gone through major internal restructuring, the need for a new web design to reflect the change is obvious. The same applies if your company is altering its brand or direction. Perhaps you’re expanding into a new area and want the new emphasis to be a focal point of the site. Your web site needs to reflect the goals of your business.
6. Is the current design hurting your company in the search engines? Does your existing site use architecture or technology that is search engine hostile? Are you using frames, javascript, forms, session IDs, flash or other elements that may limit the ability of a spider to crawl your site?
A tried and true method of improving a site’s search engine compatibility is improving its crawlabilty. If your site has roadblocks, search engine spiders may have difficulty with crawling, and consequently your pages may not be getting the recognition they deserve.
Search friendly web design is an important component to a good search presence. If your current design is limiting what spiders can index, take heart: You may only be one redesign away from new traffic. Make sure you pick a designer that is knowledgeable about spider traps. For added insurance hire an experienced optimization firm to consult with your web design company as the design is developed. It is much cheaper to fix the design during the planning stage than “retro-fixing” after it’s been launched.
Even the other way round if your site is already ranked highly on search engine. The thing to keep in mind is to not come up with a design which might hurt the organic traffic. For example moving from a difficult to manage and highly ranked HTML site to a new dynamic and easily managed site the architecture team should put their heads together to inherit the existing attributes of the site which make it crawlable.
All the exsitng metas, keyword, content etc…should be retained. The leagacy URL’s should be retained and 301’d to keep the rankings.
7. Does your existing site show its age? Just as on Fifth Avenue, there are also fashion trends in web design. Someone with even a little industry knowledge can often approximate the date of your site based on its characteristics. Black backgrounds with yellow text and visible hit counters are the shag carpets and avocado appliances of the online world. They haunt us from a distant era—in this case the late 1990s. If your company is trying to project a modern, sleek image spinning globes and blinking text is certainly not the way.
8. Does the old design not support all the growth areas? We’ve all seen sites that give the impression that new items have been tacked on to an existing design. This lack of assimilation gives the user a patchwork feeling instead of a cohesive feeling about the site.
After awhile the web site looks like a messy bulletin board. If the original design no longer supports the added material and the added elements detract from the site organization, it may be time to develop a new design.
9. Was the original web site created to be “pretty” rather than functional? Miriam Ellis ofSolas Web Design has a few poignant points concerning sites that were built without regard to functionality. “This is where you see that a great deal of money has been spent to create flash graphics, splash pages, pop ups, AJAX etc. Little money may have been invested in developing valuable text content, and little time may have been spent considering how the site will be used by humans. In cases like these, it’s the designer’s job to redesign the site so that the backbone of it shifts from gimmick based to text based.”
“It never comes as good news that investment on something that is actually tripping up the [search engine spidering] bots or driving business away from them, but the sooner they find this out, the better off they will be. They can then formulate a plan with the designer to offer an experience that is simpler and much more informative for the end user. Flash elements, such as a video, AJAX calls on content centric pages, Iframes to make the pages faster can certainly enhance that experience, but should not be the overall format of a website. This scenario tends to be most prevalent among large, well-funded companies who have been sold on the idea that being ‘cool’ is where the profit is. In a few cases, this may actually be true, but for the most part, I’ve found that being simple and useful is where the profit is.”
Redesign Is A Weighty Consideration
A site redesign is not a casual decision. Depending on the size and complexity of your site, redesigning could involve a considerable expense. Do your research. Take the time to conduct usability studies, perform surveys of your visitors pertaining to your site functionality and pour over your analytics to see what your site’s strengths and weaknesses are. Once you’ve compared positive to negative and pro to con, combine the information with your answers to the nine questions above and the decision about redesigning should become crystal clear.
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